AMD to Help Aid VR Adoption with Pricing Strategies, but Content Remains a Major Barrier

It has been estimated in the past that there are only about 7.5 million PCs out there that are going to be good enough to give people a good virtual reality experience. However, big guns like AMD are trying to mitigate the situation and somehow aid in the adoption of the medium among the community.

The Corporate Vice President of Alliances and Technology at the company, Roy Taylor, recently talked about the issues that the VR market is going to face in the coming years. He says that although the costs are not going to matter much in the first year of the lives of Oculus Rift and others, it will become cost-prohibitive.

Taylor says that the number of PCs that are going to be powerful enough for VR is less but with the AMD Polaris architecture they are going to change that by allowing to run a good quality of virtual reality experience at a low price:

If you look at the minimum spec for either the Oculus or the HTC, and then you look at how many units of the minimum spec have been sold since their launch, so I’m talking about the Radeon 290 or GeForce GTX 970, according to Jon Peddie Research, the total install base of those parts or better is 7.5 million units. So we’re going to have to make it possible to run good quality VR at a much lower price. And I’m confident with Polaris we’re going to have a big impact to help that.

However, Taylor does add that the second major barrier in the way of VR adoption (apart from costs) is going to be the amount of quality content that is going to be available to the users. Naturally, that is something AMD cannot directly impact, but Taylor says that unless we have people trying out the content and saying “I tried something and it was so great, I would have spent 10 hours in there if I could have done,” the VR market is not going to be on the right track.

Being the Managing Editor of TechFrag, Sarmad splits his time between keeping up with latest news, technology, gaming and other awesome things like unearthing the merits of staying up at night and Californication!